It gives you a proactive approach. It is almost like it can foresee what's coming fault-wise speaking, and the key is the proprietary Inductive Modeling Technology that it has that gives it that edge ahead of other products.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched mainly because the company needed scalability.

We were using Zabbix, a similar product, at the time, and we had a custom poller written in C and six servers to make it run. However, to get it past 12k elements (the break point for this solution), we would have to redo the entire file system using GFS from Red Hat to allow simultaneous write for a shared storage area. So, when we presented the project, the company realized it was time to invest in an enterprise solution. CA Spectrum was the winner after a series of tests and PoC process with the suppliers.

This is a very stable product. It helps us to be proactive and prevents the company from losing money and business, by monitoring the entire network (data and voice) of the company (head office and branches) in real time, showing exactly where errors occur.

CA UIM and CA Spectrum were the key factors in increasing the SLA from the IT environment to 99.99%, from the 99.5% achieved without CA solutions. This achievement completely changed the way how LoBs see and recognize IT as their partners, avoiding the blame game and finger-pointing. After improving the SLA metrics, the next step was to get closer to the LoBs and provide relevant dashboards, punting together business views and emphasizing how it is related to IT, and vice versa.

With CA Spectrum, we are now able to monitor more proactively network assets, reduce the total downtime of these and prevent money from being lost for device stoppages. The tool also gave us an event integrator for all other solutions, including non-CA solutions, forming a consolidated view of all information sent. From customized polices, we can standardize device nomenclature, facilitating the opening of external tickets and improve tracking them.

We were using SolarWinds previously and it just did not offer a lot of the features that CA Spectrum does. CA worked really hard to create a strategic partnership with us which is very important. Being a large company, we have a wide range of products that we use from various different vendors and we need that support. We chose CA over IBM, and also SolarWinds. So again, the scalability of the product, the ease of implementation, and the account team was way easier to work with than any of the other vendors.